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wolfmurphy

I am not an Intel employee, but I play one on television. I started playing with computers when I was 16 writing a blackjack game using Hollerith cards on an IBM 1130. I've made my career choices based on potential fun to be had, which led to a 30+ year career working for SuperComputer manufacturers, and then to "teaching career"++. I know the cake is a lie, but the Fantoccini approach to technology is not a lie. The ++ in my work as a computer science professor at Contra Costa College, is my work with SC Education (http://sc-education.org/), educating faculty about parallel and distributed computing, and the burgeoning metaverse exploring how meld HPC and the verse (http://sciencesim.com/). All this inexorably led me to volunteer my time on this blog. BTW my name is Tom Murphy, an ever popular name previously Intel claimed by another, hence my lupine pseudonym.

In the company of friends

By wolfmurphy (9 posts) on November 4, 2009 at 12:57 pm
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You are hereby invited to a gathering on November 17 at 5:30 pm in room C124 of the Oregon Convention Center in Portland. We are having a panel discussion focused on incorporating parallelism into the Computer Science curriculum. Of course, you might need to purchase a day pass to SC09 to attend, if you are [...]

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Category: Academic, Parallel Prog. & Multi-Core, Software Engineering

A program Harold Hill might like

By wolfmurphy (9 posts) on November 3, 2009 at 4:15 pm
Comments (2)

I just finished writing a 76 byte program. I gave my Computer Architecture midterm yesterday. One of the four problems was to predict the output of a 17 byte program. This is with an assembly language where the bulk of the instructions are three bytes. The correct answer is of course 42, once the unconditional branch [...]

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Category: Academic, Parallel Prog. & Multi-Core, Uncategorized

When is a case study not a case study?

By wolfmurphy (9 posts) on July 16, 2009 at 7:00 am
Comments (3)

When it isn't. When I was a student I typically ignored case studies from my textbooks, as do my students, as well they should. I have not taken the time, a fair hunk of time, to prepare assignments based on the case studies. This is the only realistic way to help students absorb them. I [...]

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Category: Academic, Parallel Prog. & Multi-Core

What's in a name? That which we call a contest, by any other name would succeed as gloriously.

By wolfmurphy (9 posts) on June 27, 2009 at 8:34 pm
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We just successfully wrote and ran a student contest for TeraGrid ‘09. It was an exhausting satisfying experience. The questions we came up with are at http://wiki.sc-education.org/index.php/Tg09-student-contest. We had nine fascinating diverse teams ranging from an all high school team through an all grad school one, with many interesting permutations and combinations of high school, [...]

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Category: Academic, Parallel Prog. & Multi-Core

What are students worth?

By wolfmurphy (9 posts) on June 20, 2009 at 2:03 pm
Comments (7)

Don't get me wrong, I won't solicit you to traffic in students, though I do insidiously and relentlessly labor to permanently hook students on concepts and ideas. The interview with Charlie Peck prompted this blog. For he is the one infecting me with new ways of helping students. At Earlham, students are involved in all aspects [...]

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Category: Uncategorized

I Cuda written more, but unlike Polonius, I actually will be brief

By wolfmurphy (9 posts) on June 16, 2009 at 10:58 am
Comments (4)

Thanks to Wen-Mei for a delightful chat. I found your site, http://courses.ece.illinois.edu/ece498/al/, with the curricula for your Programming Massively Parallel Processors course. This curricula fosters students acquiring practical experience, typically learned toiling hours to days in trenches with little sleep, and less coffee. I plan to look over his mathematically prodigious mini-case studies to seek [...]

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Category: Academic, Parallel Prog. & Multi-Core

Instruction Level Lock-step Parallelism on desert islands

By wolfmurphy (9 posts) on May 28, 2009 at 2:58 pm
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I told myself that all my posts here would be crosstaggable to both academic and multi-core, but Henry Neeman has got me all riled up. Half this blog will NOT be about multi-core, but half will; it is thus a semi-multi-core post. Henry is Director of the OU Supercomputing Center for Education & Research (OSCER) at the [...]

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Category: Academic, Parallel Prog. & Multi-Core

The Best Stuff on Earth is not limited to beverage manufacturing

By wolfmurphy (9 posts) on May 22, 2009 at 8:17 am
Comments (6)

I was reminded to cite some of the good stuff that is out there, on which I am involved and/or rely, as well as to solicit references to your good stuff. The week-long SC summer workshops are focused on undergraduate computational science education. Computational science where a scientist/expert makes sure a right problem is being solved, [...]

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Category: Academic, Parallel Prog. & Multi-Core

Greetings Programs!

By wolfmurphy (9 posts) on May 20, 2009 at 1:12 pm
Comments (5)

I don't promise that is my last cheesy Tron reference, but I can promise lots of cheesy references. My students get the shorter end of the stick, cause they have to put up with it for 18 weeks at a time. Blogs and blog posts end up having a life of their own, serendipitously in unexpected [...]

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Category: Academic, Parallel Prog. & Multi-Core